The U.S. incarceration machine imprisons more people than in any other country. Music-Making in U.S. Prisons looks at the role music-making can play in achieving goals of accountability and healing that challenge the widespread assumption that prisons and punishment keep societies safe. The book’s synthesis of historical research, contemporary practices, and pedagogies of music-making inside prisons reveals that, prior to the 1970s tough-on-crime era, choirs, instrumental ensembles, and radio shows bridged lives inside and outside prisons. Mass incarceration had a significant negative impact on music programs. Despite this setback, current programs testify to the potency of music education to support personal and social growth for people experiencing incarceration and deepen social awareness of the humanity found behind prison walls. Cohen and Duncan argue that music-making creates opportunities to humanize the complexity of crime, sustain meaningful relationships between incarcerated individuals and their families, and build social awareness of the prison industrial complex. The authors combine scholarship and personal experience to guide music educators, music aficionados, and social activists to create restorative social practices through music-making.

Offering a lively, international, and interdisciplinary introduction to research on arts programmes in prisons, Arts in Criminal Justice and Corrections is the first volume to bring together leading figures from the USA, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Belgium to explore key methodological approaches and issues through the lens of the researchers themselves. Beginning with the original pioneers of research into the arts in corrections in the USA in the 1980s, this book highlights the role of researchers in evidencing impact and influencing policy. Contributors include those who were themselves once incarcerated and those who have transitioned from practitioner to criminologist. Chapters lay the groundwork for discussion on how an important avenue for rehabilitation and re-entry can be developed, providing a call to action for more research into a field which holds promise for building a more just, equitable, and inclusive society. This book is essential reading for criminologists engaged in prisons, corrections, and desistance research, as well as researchers and practitioners in the arts and rehabilitation.

Sidelined and derailed. That’s how Suzanne Kelsey felt three decades ago after her husband of fourteen years announced his decision to become a Methodist minister. They were thirty-four and had two young sons. An independent free-thinker who believes in a divine something-or-other but not organized religion, Kelsey values her privacy and likes to settle in and nest. She felt her husband was choosing an itinerant, public life of commitment to doctrine for both of them. Kelsey wanted no part of that strange world. In Skipping Church: Notes from an Accidental Minister’s Wife, Kelsey explores what callings are and who gets to claim them, whether a life right for one is right for two, how to live authentically despite pressures to be different, how nature and art can ground us spiritually even if we’re not religious, and where home is for those who move frequently. These musings, laced with humor and infused with honesty, are accompanied by scenes from Kelsey’s life as she gradually made peace with her husband’s career decision while forging her own path.

"Raising the Living Dead is a new history of Puerto Rico's carceral rehabilitation system in the middle decades of the twentieth century that brings to life the interactions of incarcerated people, their wider social networks, and health care professionals. The book addresses key issues in the history of prisons and the histories of medicine and belief, including how prisoners' different racial, class, and cultural identities shaped their incarceration and how professionals living in a colonial society dealt with the challenge of rehabilitating prisoners for citizenship. The main idea of the book is that, in the region, multiple communities of care came together both inside and outside of prisons to imagine and imperfectly enact solution-oriented cultures of rehabilitation. Specifically, Alberto Ortiz Díaz argues that scientific and humanistic approaches to well-being were deliberately fused to raise the "living dead" (an expression that reemerged in the modern Caribbean to refer to prisoners). These reform groups sought to raise incarcerated people physically, mentally, socially, spiritually, and civically. The book is based on deep, original archival research into the Oso Blanco (White Bear) penitentiary in Puerto Rico, yet it situates its study within Puerto Rico's broader carceral archipelago and other Caribbean prisons. The agents of this history include not only physical health professionals, but also their mental health counterparts (psychologists and psychiatrists), social workers, spiritual and religious practitioners, and, of course, the prisoners and their families. By following all these groups and emphasizing the interpersonal exercise of power, Ortiz Díaz is able to tell a story that goes beyond structural and social control debates. Raising the Living Dead is not just about convicts, their immediate interlocutors, and their contexts, however, but about how together these open a window into the history of social uplift projects within the (neo)colonial societies of the Caribbean. There is no book like this in Caribbean historiography and few examine these themes in the larger literature on the history of prisons"--

Takes the reader inside the walls of a medium-security prison and offers a glimpse at how music and the arts are offering second chances to the incarcerated. In a place often defined by trauma and control, a performing chorus composed of inmates and volunteers creates a community where healing, atonement and growth can occur.